How would you redesign the emotional spectrum?
By PumpkinBomb 14 Comments
I've been thinking a bit about the Green Lantern emotional spectrum and how it's constructed a bit oddly. For one thing, indigo and violet are rarely used in common parlance (and there's no scientific difference anyways), while the prime number of colours prevents the spectrum from having symmetry. Greed is more of a sociological concept, love and compassion are a little too similar, and willpower isn't an emotion by any stretch of the imagination. Yellow power rings don't even feed off of fear! Much of these difficulties are constraints of history; but if we were to start from the beginning, here's how I'd have done it.
Red - Anger (opposes serenity)
- positive: courage (opposes aloofness)
- negative: hatred (opposes trust)
- positive: hope (opposes guilt)
- negative: indulgence (opposes remorse)
- positive: confidence (opposes envy)
- negative: contempt (opposes compassion)
- positive: trust (opposes hatred)
- negative: indifference (opposes courage)
- positive: remorse (opposes hedonism)
- negative: guilt (opposes hope)
- positive: compassion (opposes contempt)
- negative: desire (opposes confidence)
There's a natural conflict between opposing colours, and any given corpsman would have the potential to follow the light or dark side, as it were. I think this provides a lot more flexibility and storytelling space than the current version. Thoughts? Implications? How would you have constructed it?